Word: tartares
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...Tartar Trip...
...TARTAR STEPPE (214 pp.)-D/no Buzzafi-Farrar, Straus & Young...
...have lurked in the background of many contemporary novels. But Italy's Dino Buzzati, best known in the U.S. for his children's story, The Bears' Famous Invasion in Sicily, is one of the few who have come close to rewriting a whole Kafka parable. The Tartar Steppe follows the style, mood and architecture of Kafka's Castle, the story of man struggling hopelessly to enter a stronghold in whose depths, could he but fathom them, lay faith and stability. The difference is that Buzzati's hero struggles from within the stronghold itself...
...courage are of value. It is an answer that would have left Kafka as restless as before and convinced Dostoevsky that the Nihilists had won the day. But Author Buzzati, no Existentialist himself, presents it as a universal truth, a faith to die for; and so, though The Tartar Steppe suffers from being a copy of The Castle, it gains from the gravity and human sympathy with which it is written. Like many another modern novel, it reads like an atheist's funeral march-in which the composer (to say nothing of the corpse) is numbly resigned...
Food was the most frequent cause of revolt in those days, however. Commons fare was austere, and the diners hardly got an egg in their beer. As a matter of fact, one morning they even had a tartar emetic in their coffee, thanks to the famous efforts of two chem students...